[patio11]

I do more of my traveling from airport to suburbs than inside the city, so I get to use a car service. It is pretty simple: I call American Taxi (by way of Bangalore), they send me an Eastern European immigrant with a car, and he whisks me home for the published flat fee.

Their incentive to not screw me is that they value my continued custom (and chargebacks are a beast). His incentive to not screw me is that he values his cell phone continuing to buzz with new fares. They transparently operate in a low-trust environment: there are cards in the back of the back of the car for who to call for a refund in event of a dispute.

Putting this on an iPhone makes it geekier, but does not appear to change the threat model. No medallion, and pretty close to a technolibertarian paradise. I feel the need to illegalize something to wipe that smug look off their faces. :)

Sadly, they are legally prohibited from offering exactly the same service if both endpoints are within Chicago proper.

[nvrnude]

Putting it on iphone allows UberCab to collect a profile for all drivers and customers and make that profile value (ratings) publicly available for future riders and clients. Transparency is good but recorded transparency made publicaly available for future decisions becomes powerful.

[tptacek]

This drastically idealizes UberCab profiles. That's easy to do now when UberCab is largely an abstraction, and the sole provider. It gets a lot shadier when UberCab is one of 10 companies doing this, when the market segments along lots of other attributes (high-end and low-end providers &c), and when it starts to become worth it to game profiles.

[ajju]

When you say "by way of Bangalore", do they have their call center in Bangalore? /just curious how many taxi dispatch services do this.

[abalashov]

Yes.

[tptacek]

Putting it on the iPhone scales the process up. Some things work fine at Patrick McKenzie scales, but not so fine at 40 fares per day per cab. There is immense competition for airport fares (it's one of the big problems with cab service in SF) and more incentive not to play games. The same can't be said of random fares on city streets.

The only time I've ever been screwed with by a cab driver was with an unlicensed car service.

[patio11]

American Taxi dispatches forty thousand fares a week. They're a wee bit bigger than me.

[tptacek]

Come on, Patrick. American Taxi is pretty much the cab company for all of the Chicago suburbs. You think they do 40k fares to/from ORD? That's 500 fares an hour.

There's a difference between airport taxi service by chauffeur-licensed drivers dispatched by a branded cab company (with something to lose if drivers misbehave) and "I signed up with 1 of 5 different companies that dispatch cabs with iPhones".

I don't have prove that the Chicago medallion system is sensible; I'm only objecting to the notion that there is no valid concern behind them other than for-profit restraint of trade. There are absolutely valid concerns behind medallions. Go to an NYC airport or outside Penn Station and find an unlicensed cab; take 10 drives, and tell me how many of them try to screw you over. Do the same thing with medallion drivers; none of them will.

[three14]

In NYC, my experience with unlicensed cabs at airports is limited, but every time they did try to take advantage.

However, I had much more experience with unlicensed cabs in Washington Heights (north end of Manhattan, where licensed cabs refuse to cruise around to get business) and I never remember anyone trying to rip me off. Much of the time this wasn't with calling any specific company, just flagging down (illegally) whichever car was passing.

I think there's just too much money to be made from unsuspecting tourists at NYC airports.

[CWuestefeld]

Medallions serve to limit who is allowed to provide the service. There is no need for this limitation in order to ensure honest service.

For example, cabs could earn (and risk losing) a "Good Cabdriving Seal". There's no need for the quantity of such seals to be artificially limited: they could be unlimited, but only awarded to those that prove worthy.

And while we're at it, the agency doing the certification need not be a government agency at all. Why not Good Housekeeping, or Underwriters Laboratories, or Better Business Bureau?

[maxawaytoolong]

Only the government has authority to do something to the cab driver, though. The Better Business Bureau can't tell you to stop driving your cab.

The medaillion system is weird, but it works in new york.

The people who think that the invisible hand of the market would improve cab service are awesomely naive. The reason why cabs aren't fucked up in NYC is because of all the regulations, which can only be enforced because the cabbies have something to lose (the mediallion). If there was no government interference, cabs still wouldn't take credit cards, they wouldn't pick up non-white people, they wouldn't drive you to Brooklyn, they would form their own cabal and eventually rip out their meters and just make up whatever price they wanted to charge you, once you got there.

[CWuestefeld]

You're only saying that they work in NYC because you're taking for granted all of the failures. For example, how many times have you said "where's a cab when you need one?"?

because of all the regulations, which can only be enforced because the cabbies have something to lose

You think that the loss of the "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval", or "UL Certification", or the like is nothing? Don't you think that potential customers would quickly learn to look for that emblem on a cab?

If there was no government interference, cabs still wouldn't

Nonsense. You're just making stuff up, without the slightest evidence. Do you really believe that cab customers would turn away paying customers just because they're not white? And even if they did, that would just open an opportunity for a minority-catering company to make a killing.

[rsingel]

Actually, airport fares aren't that great and they are getting worse for drivers (fee changes and cops on 101). But for the drivers who don't want to work much it's fun to hang out there. The problem with cabs in SF isn't SFO, it's simply there aren't enough cabs on Thursday to Saturday nights.

[tptacek]

Last time I had this discussion with a cab driver in SF, he explained that there's some issue with the way cabs are dispatched in SF that pulls drivers to SFO, and that SFO is overserved at the expense of the city. I wish I could remember the details.

It wasn't "cabs are lazy".

[muhfuhkuh]

Ugh, don't get me started on SF cabbies. They are not only licensed but regulated by price. They also pretend to not know where anything is and will drive around to find your destination, hiking cab fares up accordingly. And, because you may not know the lay of the land (and can't understand their likely intentionally-thick foreign accents), you can't exactly tell them where to go. I had one that claimed to not know the best way to Coit Tower from the Ferry Building, so _he asked me_. Seriously.

It's a big rip-off and I am thankful whenever I visit SF to have a zipcard. Now I only pay BART to get me from SFO to (near) our vacation rental. If ubercab can provide fares without that runaround, I'm all for it.